The activist investor and founder of the hedge fund Third Point has sought to instigate change at the food maker. He blames poor deal making for the near-halving of the company’s share price over the past three years, and wants its shareholders to replace the entire board of 12 people.

But cutting costs from those bad deals should raise Campbell’s valuation whatever happens.

Mr. Loeb described a 100-day plan for the company in a presentation that he published on Tuesday, which included a proposal to “hit the ground running” in order to revive the company’s soup. He believes that Campbell’s stock could be worth $70 a share by 2022 if he can overhaul the board and implement other changes. That’s roughly 45 percent higher than its current price, and almost where the stock traded in early 2016 before Campbell bought Pacific Foods and Snyder’s-Lance, leaving it financially and operationally stretched.

The idea is to boost earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization to $2 billion by 2020, from an estimated $1.6 billion in 2019. That’s easy to get behind.

But nearly half of that increase would come from achieving cost savings from deals that had previously been announced. In fact, if the company simply met its expected cost-cutting targets and did nothing else, using Loeb’s assumptions of net debt and his suggested 12 times earnings multiple to derive the company’s enterprise value, the shares that currently trade at around $38 would be worth over $62 apiece by 2022, or nearly $46 in today’s money.

It may be that Loeb would be better at achieving those cost savings. But his goal of replacing the whole board with his own people is unrealistic. Campbell’s top three shareholders are heirs to the founder, and they collectively own more than 40 percent of the stock. Loeb would need to get roughly 85 percent of the outside shareholders on board with his plan — and that only works if all of them vote.

There’s a middle way: for Campbell to give Mr. Loeb a board seat or two as a compromise. That is what the activist investor Nelson Peltz was given at Procter & Gamble in March, despite losing a similar vote, and it would give investors the benefit of both continuity and expertise.

Lauren Silva Laughlin is a columnist at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com